The present invention relates to a flexible image acquisition and processing system comprising an electrooptical transducer for converting light signals into electric signals; an analogue-level video signal amplifying and processing stage; a multilevel analogue-digital converter for supplying digital output signals representing the said image; a digital video signal two-dimensional convoluting stage; and means for controlling the operating phases of the said system, which is thus suitable for employment on an image processing system comprising subsequent "high-level" processing modules based on more complex algorithms.
In recent years, image processing systems have played a decisive role in the development of numerous applications including optical text/graphic reading and, in particular, image acquisition from microfilms, automatic readers for sorting mail, and image acquisition from documents, for both video reproduction and automatic character identification.
The above applications all pose particularly severe demands (for example, image acquisition from microfilms is hindered by the minute size of the object involved, by flaws in the film, and by dust; whereas, image acquisition for mail sorting is hindered by major differences in the quality of the various items being handled). Consequently, the development of image acquisition and processing systems for such applications has demanded increasingly better performance, in terms of quality, specialization and processing speed, from both the image acquisition unit and the first "low-level" processing module, i.e. based on relatively simple algorithms but handling an enormous amount of data.